Film Review: The Adventures Of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn

'Plucky Belgian journalist seeks lost treasure with drunken seaman in swashbuckling adventure'. While this might sound like a salacious advert pulled from the naughty section of Craigslist, I can assure you that it is the plot for a new film involving one of the most recognisable childhood heros of a generation. That film of course is Steven Spielberg's incarnation of The Adventures of Tintin.

Tintin has a particularly unique effect on its audience, as is faithful to creator Hergé's male detective who possesses as much childlike wonder and naivety as he does the real-world acumen and perspicacity of an adult. And yet he has no discernable age. This is because Tintin, voiced by Jamie Bell, is a blank slate onto which we project ourselves; inoffensive and vacuously presentable, yet reacting to extraordinary situations in ways we might imagine should such events befall us. Tintin consequently appeals to the whole spectrum of ages watching it.

This is a theme which extends throughout the film, set in locations which, for example, may or may not be Paris, at a time which could be anywhere from the 1920s to the 1960s. It poses a strange paradox, almost like a dream in that Hergé's creation is both so rich in details, palpable to the senses and instantly recognisable, yet equally blank and unfurnished to the point where Tintin's setting is there and nowhere at the same time. But this is the magic trick, to create a vessel for our own imaginations.

To describe The Adventures Of Tintin as an endless, 'action packed' roller coaster would be a gross understatement in what is literally scene after scene of action set pieces. Admittedly everything looks mighty impressive in glorious CGI and everything is incredibly well choreographed, but it does get old and leaves our human protagonists disappointingly bare-boned. Nonetheless it will no doubt delight children, however to say the film is childish in its themes would also be a misjudgement. Perhaps surprisingly for a PG film, death is alluded to throughout as is the very real sense that bullets actually mean business. While gore is never visible, invariably scenes involving guns or sword-play end with some glimpse of fatality.

Moreover, take one Captain Archibald Haddock (Serkis), a drunken sailor from whom most of the film's humour stems from. We have here a man who thinks it prudent to stop off in the ship's galley and load up on bottles of whiskey while a bunch of goons with guns chase him and Tintin. Yes, stumbling about in a drunken stupor doing stupid things is funny, but Haddock's situation is so pathetic that it's almost pitiful. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but while it's all fun and games to restart a a piston engine by belching alcoholic fumes into it, it is perhaps not so funny when your alcoholism continuously endangers you and your friend's lives. Throughout, I was never quite sure what message Tintin was sending to children. Was it a warning to the dangers of alcohol? Or was it more an advertisement, as if to say 'hey, getting drunk is pretty fucking funny!'. Unfortunately despite the best efforts of our Captain, The Adventures Of Tintin is never outright hilarious. Sure I grinned, but it never evoked so much as a bawdy laugh from yours truly.

Tintin is nonetheless a true Spielberg film, sporting elements of Indy (and even shades of the Uncharted videogames) with the heart to match. Like with most of Spielberg's films this implores you to invest in Hergé's ensorcelling world, dazzlingly realised in gorgeous CGI. For the kid in all of us this is a high-spirited effort which has the capacity to delight. However, it is also somewhat disappointing that there isn't much fat to chew on here. A break for pause to catch one's breath would have been most welcome in places, but overall this is a fairly spunky and charming tale which is capriciously realised.

Film Review: War Horse

Having spent much of the noughties dabbling in twisty sci-fi pics such as Minority Report and A.I. it's back to basics for Spielberg, once again forging a technically faultless, warm, heartfelt family drama in the same spirit which gained him notoriety during the eighties and nineties. And for a man who has spent half his movie-making career embracing the turbulent decades of the thirties and forties it certainly isn't surprising that Spielberg once again busts out his time machine.

When nebbish Ted Narracott (Mullan) outbids a local gentry man (Thewlis) on a feisty thoroughbred in order to prove a point, his son Albert (Irvine) immediately takes to the horse he names Joey. However when war is declared the British army soon draft Joey into the care of a well-meaning cavalry officer (Hiddleston). As Albert pines for his companion so begins a campaign which takes this "remarkable" horse across the battlefields of the First World War.

War Horse harks back to those days of a simpler time for films, that of a linear narrative which featured a beginning, a middle and an end. If you've seen a Spielberg film before then you will instantly know from the off that Joey and Albert are destined to be reunited and it is here where lies the problem with War Horse. While there's nothing wrong with its old-fashioned mechanics it does however make everything consistently predictable. Further, tales using such narrative structures typically involve blunt use of sentimentality which cause its payoff to be somewhat tepid. Alas Spielberg is someone utterly incapable of understatement and while this may have worked in the past his emotional pageantry now appears dated. And at two and a half hours long this can be a tad tedious.

While Albert is ostensibly the main human character his journey from boy to manhood remains curiously nascent. This is particularly annoying given the lengthy amount of time spent introducing us to him and the horse. War Horse, as its title suggests, is foremost a film about a horse. So much so that it almost leaves an impression of its main human lead as having a slightly unnerving affection toward his equine friend. A normal young man Albert's age might have a sweetheart or a group of mates, or maybe even take at least a passing interest in other people. But no. There's definitely no hint that he engages in regular social interaction. Instead Albert lives for letters updating him on the condition of his horse from the front. And as soon as he's old enough Albert joins the army, primarily in pursuit of his horse. Sure, it's one thing to form a bond with an animal, but for it to supersede all your human relationships is just plain weird. Latent bestiality concerns aside, underdeveloped characters are unfortunately endemic throughout. War Horse makes a habit of introducing us to potentially interesting characters with a huge potential for growth only to never develop them further. In that sense there is a feeling of incompletion here. Yes, we know what happens to Joey the horse, but not really about anyone else.

The most striking aspect of War Horse is how distinctly anti-war it is. If there's one thing it does reasonably well it is to capture the wasteful nature of conflict. The thought of 'poor horse, stupid humanity' soon begins to take hold in a strange twist of species allegiance as we watch the poor beast become a pawn of human petulance. Joey's journey takes him into the service of the British, the Germans and the French, all of whom exhaust their 'supply' of horse power. Perhaps surprisingly it is those surly horse-eating Frenchmen who are portrayed as the most villainous employers of Joey, working their horses to death hulking huge artillery pieces up mud hills. Certainly, this makes a change from Hollywood's quintessential baddy, our jackbooted German friends. However the principle remains that here we have this noble, innocent creature cajoled into facilitating man's destruction of one another. There is definitely a sense that maybe it would be better if Earth's creatures were left unencumbered by the dastardly pursuits of man, however you interpret that.

Still, War Horse has a fair amount going for it. The visuals are beautiful, using a gorgeous palette to capture the English countryside, equally impressive in its use of brown and grey to paint a palpable picture of the harrowing and desolate landscapes of the Western front. And while its narrative structure might be dated it does have a tendency to induce nostalgia pangs for a type of film from a bygone age. Certainly this is no post-modern tale of twists and turns, but to be fair Spielberg does have a knack for a highly enjoyable brand of storytelling. And while this is probably a bit mawkish by today's standards, War Horse is above all unique in its intergenerational appeal. It is one of those films where at midday around Easter kids, adults and grandparents gather round their TVs to watch. And that is a very rare quality in films nowadays.

This Means Something!

So this is how I spent Christmas Day, playing with my food. Given the mashed potato, it was almost impossible not to mimic one of the most famous scenes in movie history...

Film Review: Cowboys & Aliens

You can almost picture the boardroom scene. "We need something that will make us millions" a gruff voice and a plume of cigar smoke emanates from a figure in the shadows. "What about aliens? They're big at the moment. We could cash in on the bandwagon" pipes up a fresh faced exec. "Something a bit more original. We need a hook, not another generic film about little green men invading the Earth" replies the man, taking another puff from his cigar as a glint of light catches his silver hair. "Cowboys! It's a classic concept and about time the genre was rejuvenated" contributes a more experienced producer. There's a pause. A hush descends over the boardroom. "I've got it! what if we combined cowboys and aliens?!". And so a film was born.

Set in Arizona, 1873, a man (Craig) suffering amnesia is found by a group of bandits in the middle of the desert with a strange bangle attached to his wrist. Heading for the nearest town of Absolution in search for answers to his identity, he soon discovers he is wanted criminal Jake Lonergan and was abducted like many other townsfolk by what they refer to as 'demons'. When the powerful local cattle rancher Woodrow Dolarhyde's (Ford) son is also taken, he and Lonergan set out to liberate the prisoners from the clutches of strange creatures.

Of course, Cowboys & Aliens is a bizarre concept which really shouldn't work. It sounds like an incredibly silly idea that would be instantly shot down in the Dragon's Den. But this wasn't born from a meeting of Hollywood producers who were all baked at the time. Cowboys & Aliens is actually based on a graphic novel created by Scott Mitchell Rosenberg supported by some very powerful backers in the movie industry. Directed by Jon Favreau with a screenplay written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof (the geniuses behind the likes of Lost and the rebooted Star Trek franchise), as well as Steven Spielberg being one of the executive producers, you begin to get a sense of how seriously this idea was taken. And that's to say nothing of the Hollywood heavy-hitters Daniel Craig and Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford, jumping on board the project.

Admittedly the graphic novel had an altogether more serious and political tone than the film on which it is loosely based. The general idea is the same - an alien scout party arrives on Earth to mine gold, but where the film deviates is from the novel's not so subtle allegory of the white man's conquest and plundering of the Americas. Like whitey, the aliens are there to pillage the West in much the same way European colonists did to the Native American's homeland. The novel was wrapped in ethics like no man's business, pitting ray guns against rifles in much the same fashion white devils set rifle against bow and arrow. Of course, being reminded of their ancestor's genocidal past wouldn't sit so well with American audiences and so the story has sanitised the stark metaphors of the novel, instead exhibiting a much softer tone as team Earth unite under one banner. Cowboys and Injuns work together to fight off alien intruders making for a new moral re-imagining in that perhaps we're not so different after all.

Where its politics have been whitewashed, the rest of Cowboys & Aliens is actually refreshingly unsterilised. The lead character smokes (a big no-no in Hollywood these days) and the whole affair remains surprisingly more gritty than its title suggests. People get sliced open, stabbed, skewered and eviscerated into ash as blood n' guts litter proceedings. Characters aren't much cheerier either, both Craig and Ford ashen souls bereft by loss. In fact, everyone's just a bit grim, and they're all in an even grimmer situation where light relief is hard to come by. However, this plays to the film's main strength - its emphasis on traditional Western tropes. These were indeed harsh times and that is reflected here in the film's hard edge. Cowboys & Aliens exceeds most where it plays like a traditional Western. Like all good Westerns, it starts with a stranger riding into town and features the obligatory saloon fight while outlaws roam the desolate desert. This acts to reinforce that yes, this film does have aliens, but they're also part of a very real world. It actually sticks far closer to the wild west than it does to science fiction which is only a good thing. Had it deviated toward the later then this could very well have ended up like another Wild Wild West.

Indeed, the film's weakest point is its unimaginative bug-eyed lizards from outer space. More and more these days aliens seem to look like something more supernatural than other-worldly. Often hulking beasts with a primitive urge for violence (see Skyline, Super 8), aliens in Hollywood have been reduced to your pesky intergalactic-neighbourhood dicks like unwelcome racoons sifting through your rubbish bin who kidnap and kill humans indiscriminately. The ETs here for example take to abducting people, as the film explains, for the purpose of ascertaining human weaknesses. Rather than this showcasing any form of intelligence, you actually wonder how many people they need to spirit away for beam weaponry testing before they've found the optimum way of killing a human being. Oh, these aliens can build spaceships bigger than a canyon no doubt, but they display such limited signs of intelligence that they're more like avatars you shoot at in a videogame.

But it's difficult to take anything away from the fantastic performances as acting is of a high standard all round. Craig is your typical man of few words alone in the wilderness while Ford scowls and growls as per usual. Both are grumpy bastards who do their best to out-grump each other, their interaction primarily consisting of one epic grump-off in an effort to find who is the surliest of all cowboys. Olivia Wilde's ethereal cowgirl is relatively innocuous disappointingly, but she does a good job providing the eye candy. Given the title's suggestion of an overuse of special effects it's actually pleasantly surprising to see just how seriously the cast take everything rather than merely standing around waiting for explosions to happen. Indeed, there's a gratifying amount of time spent on character development where everyone is given satisfying depth. What's more however is how straight faced they play their roles, but then they needed to. Had there been any campness or folly involved then Cowboys & Aliens would have been sucked into a black hole of fail.

For a film that is suspect given its M.O. to pull in as much cash as possible, Cowboys & Aliens is actually a half-decent effort. Its lean plot, while linear, is coherent enough and minus the aliens, this could have been a good Western in its own right. Indeed, it is by far the most pulling element, there being more tension when Dolarhyde's son bullies the town than when aliens begin strafing it. The cowboys are good, the aliens not so much, but this is fun in places. Perhaps the only disappointment being that it's not quite the cult classic one might have hoped for.

Film Review: Super 8

They don't make them like they used to. Lost seems to be the genuine warmth and vim present in movies from a bygone era, replaced with the perceived need for audacious action sequences and to blow up everything in sight. Spielberg was, and arguably still is the master of such heartfelt storytelling which the whole family can gather around. And so it is understandable that there was a palpable excitement emanating from a generation brought up on goodies such as Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET when it became apparent Spielberg was producing JJ Abrams homage and first feature as writer and director in the form of Super 8.

Set in 1979 (reference to Three Mile Island), Charles (Griffiths) and Joe (Courtney) are two best buds hoping their homemade zombie movie will win an upcoming film festival. Joined by pyromaniac Cary (Lee), brains Preston (Mills), lanky Martin (Basso), and new addition Alice (Fanning), the Goonies-esque group sneak out one night to capture a pivotal scene only to witness a spectacular train crash. Stumbling through the debris they find their science teacher who warns them not to speak of the incident. It soon becomes apparent that something escaped from the wreck when people, dogs and electrical appliances begin to disappear.

Super 8's opening is spellbinding. It starts by settling down with that recreated Spielberg-esque suburban feel from ET and Close Encounters; charming and melancholic, even if you're not old enough to have experienced 1979 for yourself. This all builds to a crescendo where an Air Force train crashes and 'something' is released into the endearing little town of Lillian, Ohio. The problem with Super 8 however is that it fails to capitalise on its fantastic opening. It doesn't quite know where to go next, fluffing personal relationships and making a bit of a mess with the lurking creature stalking the town. Indeed, after its bravura opening it struggles to conjure up anything as suitably epic or urgent to follow through with. From this point on, Super 8 needlessly gives itself a choice; whether to follow the interpersonal relationships which would give the movie its heart, or to pursue the sci-fi action that modern audiences allegedly crave. What Super 8 doesn't seem to realise is that it doesn't necessarily have to be either or, but it insists on it, creating for no apparent reason two separate movies. By doing so, it manages to bungle both.

With regards to the human story for example, there is potential for an interesting love triangle between Charles, Joe and Alice, but this is skirted over almost as soon as Charles' feelings are revealed. Likewise, there is a palpable animosity between Joe and Alice's fathers, but it is a conflict which is unsatisfactorily explained or resolved. The sci-fi element is equally muddled. There is a discernible lack of clarity surrounding the creature; described as 'ultra intelligent', yet portrayed as a maniacal man-eating beast that looks like something out of Gears of War; its behaviour explained away as having been 'wronged' by humans, yet its activities suggesting something almost evil. Such is the confusion surrounding the creature that you will neither fear nor feel empathy for it. If you compare it with the critter from ET, the one in Super 8 displays none of the same charm and there is nothing that the kids discover about it which the authorities don't already know, making them mere observers to events around them. It eats people in a vain attempt to create a sense of fear, but it just ends up feeling cheesy. Furthermore, the train crash strews Rubik's cube-like objects all over the place which the military places great significance on gathering. Yet while there is a clear air of importance empahsised upon these objects, the grand reveal as to their purpose lacks any satisfying punch. Indeed, this alien may as well be from planet MacGuffin.

Regardless, the kids are fantastic. The risk with children in movies is always that they won't be able to act or that the film feels like tacky synthetic, but there's scarcely any of that here in what is a sublimely assembled group. Their interaction and dynamics are wholly believable in what is essentially a coming of age tale. This is one of the defining moments in their lives, the twilight of their innocence and the descent into adulthood. It is an age we can all relate to and view with some nostalgia. Fanning in particular shows so much poise for her age while Courtney's first professional gig is something to be commended. Drawn together by a sense of loneliness, Alice, two-years older than the others and just crossed over to puberty, is forced to endure her depressed, alcoholic father. Joe pines for his recently deceased mother, clutching to a locket in a symbol of his grief while yearning for a sympathetic ear as his Father, the deputy sheriff, copes by burying himself in his work. Their inchoate romance blossoms as both turn in remarkable performances given their lack of experience.

Those who have watched Lost will recognise many of Abrams' own hallmarks, predominantly the device of keeping secrets. Trademark Abrams weirdness comes in spades; dogs inexplicably going missing, an unseen malevolent monster in the bushes picking off locals that may as well be smoke, and a story wrapped in secrets until the third act. The drip feed of information before a big reveal is part and parcel of the Abrams experience, but this device is no good unless you're building up to something. Indeed, Abrams himself says that "It becomes foreplay without the main event, and no one wants that". However, is that 'something' worth it? By the third act Super 8 turns into a full blown science fiction affair which unfortunately washes away much of the painstaking charm that so much effort went into creating during the first act. When it's finally revealed that there's an alien in town bent on taking people and electrical goods, the children's ensorcelling tale of filming a zombie epic becomes second fiddle.

Indeed, the troubles with Super 8 are embodied in the two different styles of Spielberg and Abrams. While on the one hand this is a love letter to Spielberg and ET, Abrams' paw prints are still all over this. It's as if Spielberg has given Abrams his keys to the car to take a girl to the high school prom. Super 8 struggles to define itself, seeking to both respect its father yet yearning to impart its own brand of rebellious youth on the world. Ultimately Abrams has his own distinctive style as does Spielberg, and it is not entirely convincing whether the two can co-exist as a certain dissonance becomes apparent. Abrams' stuff is often electrifying, full of energy (Mission Impossible 3, Star Trek, Cloverfield) where Spielberg is all the more a wholesome family experience. While Abrams is obviously a massive fan of Spielberg and does his best to pay homage to the man that gave him his first job at 15, his attempts to mimic Spielberg dilutes the effectiveness of his own style, and ultimately fails to truly replicate the aura surrounding Spielberg's films. It never fully relinquishes the sci-fi to the human emotional story in the way ET did. Abram's attempt to capture the old fashioned pluck at emotional chords doesn't set so well with the modern need to blow something up every five-minutes.

If you were to put ET, Cloverfield and Super 8 on a linear scale, this would rest somewhere in the middle. Super 8 is gentler in tone than Cloverfield, but it is nowhere near as sweet as ET. And this is where Super 8 suffers most; sitting on the fence by trying to please both family movie goers and nostalgia enthusiasts as well as sci-fi action junkies. Indeed, there's two films at work here where the human and sci-fi stories slip past each other instead of melding into one satisfying and coherent singularity. And yet, Super 8 maintains its conjuration, enamoured by its nostalgic setting and infectious exuberance. Like everything Abrams does, it is both likeable and enthralling. While there are hints of Spielberg's pizazz, unfortunately half the heart seems missing. There's nothing inherently wrong with Super 8 and while it may never actually hit the mark, the biggest disappointment has to be that given the two accomplished names involved one might have expected more.

TV Series: Falling Skies

I've noticed a trend of late, both in television and hollywood. There appears to be a current fascination of post-apocalyptic scenarios and how disparate groups of survivors deal with their new circumstances. The latest to throw its hat into this crowded emporium is TNT's 'Falling Skies'. Produced by Steven Spielberg (taking time out from his other hobby, World War II), Falling Skies is about the aftermath of an alien attack on Earth where surviving groups of humans have banded together on the outskirts of the major cities to form some sort of resistance. At the centre of Falling Skies is Tom Mason (Noah Wyle), a Boston history professor whose family is torn apart by the alien invasion. With his wife dead, and one of his three sons abducted by the aliens, Tom becomes a core leader of the resistance, utilizing all his military knowledge in an effort to gain the upper hand. A somewhat bland, if not ridiculous concept then. I'm not quite sure what use Tom's knowledge of human military history will bring to a conflict against highly advanced beings from another planet with utterly alien motivations and technical expertise, but it might be interesting anyway.

Still, judging by the premise and the trailer, Falling Skies doesn't look particularly unique when compared to shows in a similar vein such as The Walking Dead and V. In fact, it looks exactly like V. However, with the added zeel of Spielberg and Dreamworks behind it, Falling Skies may yet pull a surprise or two. But if this show is to be a success, it needs to somehow distinguish itself in what seems quickly becoming to be a saturated market.

What is interesting however is the sudden rise of this post-apocalyptic survival genre. With conspiracy theories abound and 2012 only around the corner, there might just be some truth to the prophesied doomsday events set to unfold in the next couple of years. Just maybe then there's something the 'elites' aren't telling us. Perhaps, if the-powers-that-be know what is to come, then these shows and movies might be a way to subconsciously prepare the masses without deep underground bunkers. Just a thought...

(Puts on tin foil hat)

Super 8

Might be a tad behind with this, but it's the first I've seen of it, so if you're all like "dude, that's so old!" you can just blogger off! Get it?

Anyway, this is JJ Abrams' new project. And, like with Cloverfield, no one has a fucking clue what it's about. The similarities with Cloverfield however are superficial. Yes, they both feature monsters on the loose, albeit the one in Super 8 is evidently not Godzilla in size, but that's where the comparisons end. The film is rumoured to command only a modest budget of $45million and is scheduled for release in 2011. Abrams will of course be directing and Spielberg, whose only two hobbies are WW2 and aliens, will be right at home (eh, ET?) as producer. I'm psyched. Are you?